Lloyd Lofthouse

Billionaire Bill Gates has been buying his version of American public education for years now. His first major *reform* effort began in 2000 and involved chopping large urban high schools into smaller schools. It was his solution of choice for several years.  He began to reject the “small schools” idea as The Solution in 2006 after it had been found “less successful than hoped” according to the Seattle Times. (Documented in chapter 23 of A Chronicle of Echoes and also discussed in this post.)

For Gates, the small schools failure was an inconvenience and a disappointment. (He wanted to “scale” the results.) For the school districts left holding the bag, it was incredibly disruptive.

Gates actively advances a spectrum of so-called reforms that interest him, including grading teachers using student test scores (in order to dump the “ineffective” teachers), merit pay, increased class sizes, longer school day and year, data systems to…